‘Horrible Idea’: First Vaccine for Birth Control Now in Clinical Trials

Humanity’s first contraceptive vaccine is already in clinical trials, according to an article published this week in The Atlantic.

Reporter Katherine J. Wu, Ph.D., described the vaccine, as envisioned by its developer Professor Gursaran Pran Talwar, stating that it would be:

“A new form of contraception that could block pregnancy without the usual trade-offs — an intervention that’s long-acting but reversible; cheap, discreet, and easy to administer; less invasive than an intrauterine device and more convenient than a daily pill.

“It would skip messy, sometimes dangerous side effects, such as weight gain, mood swings, and rare but risky blood clots and strokes. It would embody the sort of ‘set it and forget it’ model that’s become a gold standard for health.”

Rather than disrupting the menstrual cycle, as hormonal forms of birth control do, the vaccine uses the immune system to prevent pregnancy by blocking fertilization.

Talwar first developed the vaccine and patented a version of it in the early 1990s. That version, meant to be effective for two years before a booster was needed, was reported to be “nearly 100% effective.”

Talwar, former director of India’s National Institute of Immunology, told Wu he developed the vaccine because he knew women in India who were struggling to feed large families, but were unhappy with existing forms of contraception.

He said he wanted to make something, “free of all problems,” so he created a vaccine that would neutralize the human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) hormone, known as “the pregnancy hormone” because it is necessary for fertilized eggs to implant.

But Brian Hooker, Ph.D., P.E., chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense, said such a vaccine doesn’t just have problems, “It is an absolutely horrible idea.”

Hooker told The Defender:

“So much can go wrong by ‘immunizing’ a woman with hCG identical to the hormone she produces, or men with sperm proteins to attack their own sperm at the production site.

“The big question that comes to mind is ‘reversibility.’ It is very difficult to turn off an immune response complete with memory B-cells after it has been turned on. My fear is that many would be left permanently sterile from this type of vaccine.

“Also, the problems posed by this technology related to autoimmunity are myriad.

“Essentially, by coaxing the body to attack human proteins, you also put human tissues, including primarily vital reproductive organs, in the line of fire for many harsh inflammatory processes associated with an immune response.

“This is one bad idea!”

Mary Lou Singleton, midwife and family nurse practitioner, also raised safety concerns. She told The Defender:

“This would be the first vaccine designed to provoke an immune response against a normal, healthy bodily process.

“Like all living organisms that reproduce sexually, the human body is organized around our reproductive potential.

“We have no idea what the long-term consequences of programming the immune system to attack the part of our body that sustains early pregnancy may be, but we do know that the history of medicine is full of unintended consequences.”

The Atlantic article didn’t focus on possible health risks. Instead, it touted Talwar et al.’s 1994 vaccine clinical trial, where only 1 of 119 women in the study became pregnant.

The limitations, Wu said, are in the fact that although they didn’t get pregnant, about 20% of the women did not produce the threshold amount of antibodies for the trial to be successful. This would be considered sufficiently effective for a regular vaccine, Wu wrote, but for contraception, expectations are higher…